Archive for January, 2015

I grew up with this flag as have all Australians since Federation, give or take a few points on the stars.

I grew up as an anglo-saxon with strong connection to the United Kingdom. Indeed, living in France for ten years led me to a profound understanding of what it is to have this connection.

Our language, our institutions, our dress, our architecture, our food, our ABC (aka BBC, ha ha), our media and its newspapers, the ugly thick mugs we drink tea out of around the country in universities, schools, city offices, workshops, farms, mines come from England and our mood and temperament does too. Yes, of course we are wonderfully multicultural too, full of Asians, Africans, and Indians —and I married a Sri Lankan — but I don’t know if you have noticed, so is everywhere else in the world, England included !!

And I love all of that too.

However, I resent the obsession, starting with the Bulletin one hundred years ago through to Jonathan Green and guests this very day from six o’clock this morning on their ABC, banging on about the flag, republicanism, mocking the new year’s honours — no mention of leftist barristers scrambling back to QC status — the monarchy, and somehow wanting to continue their adolescent hissy-fit about Australia needing to grow up and becoming more independent and confident when we already have and already are.

A few years ago, I went out and bought an Australian flag cooking apron in protest against the obnoxious decision by the Waverley council not to fly the Australian flag over the Bondi Pavillion in case it made certain people feel unwelcome.

All I want to say is get over it. Jonathan Green, get over it. The ABC get over it. The ALP, get over it. Be proud of our heritage, be proud of our flag. Perhaps you might all prefer to learn to speak Esperanto.

“What happens when those imported cultures involve more than mere fancy dress, when they arrive with their own power relationships, their own political ideologies and a parallel legal system, all of which is incompatible with Australian norms and traditions? What happens when new arrivals have no intention of relinquishing these features of their cultures and integrating into the mainstream? What happens when the intent is first to modify the host culture and, ultimately, to replace it?”

Yet another clarification concerning the Islamisation of the West has developed in the recent “backlash” — yes, at last — with protests in Germany and Denmark in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations.

We might call it the ‘long feared backlash’ announced and dreaded by the sensitive “i’ll ride with you hashtag” Left and the ABC who announced their fear of the rise of the European right as being a more dnagerous than plain good old Islamic fascist murder.

This backlash of anti-immigration protesters, who call themselves PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) in Germany, apparently claimed simply that they wanted protection for German culture, and felt that asylum-seekers from Muslim regions were abusing Germany’s welcoming policies toward refugees.

The censorious commentators piled in.

“This is truly a vicious cycle,” explains Brian Forst, a professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University. “Anti-immigration sentiments aimed primarily against Muslims in the West breed alienation among Muslims, and alienation breeds extremism and acts of terror, which only aggravate anti-Muslim sentiments and behaviors…Terrorism succeeds when the victim reacts badly.”

In Aarhus in Denmark, where a similar protest took place, it was met with a predictably violent attack from the Left in the name, of course, of tolerance and diversity.

Police said about 200 to 300 people from Denmark, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Poland took part in what was billed as a “European counter-jihad meeting” to protest what they called the Islamization of Europe. They were met by a 10-times larger counter-demonstration by left-wing groups under the banner “Aarhus for Diversity.”
The anti-Islamic rally started with a moment of silence for the seven people killed by an al-Qaida-inspired gunman in France.
…
Both demonstrations were peaceful until a group of black-clad, mask-wearing youth from the counter-demonstration tried to break through police lines, but officers in riot gear held them back.
After the rally finished, protesters hurled rocks and bottles at a bus carrying the far-right sympathizers as police vans escorted it out of the city center.

The violent Left always reminds me of the excellent book by Nick Cohen I reviewed several years ago concerning the Left’s love affair with fascistic Islam.

So, is there not a clear choice: to shut up and say nothing, or speak up and be accused, incorrectly, of bigotry. Where is the balance?

Up until now, adding to the frustration and backlash, has been of course the obsequious nonsense about Islam being only a religion of peace that all our leaders sing out in unison, or perhaps Renaissance polyphony, at each and every atrocity. It is this dhimmitude and cowering that has produced the frustrated backlash, not the standing up to it.

Surely the claims of the protesters are understandable. It has been exactly what has been on the minds of most people in Western democracies for several years now and of course it is building.

The hardening of the voices against unreasonable demands on Western culture, whether through creeping sharia, the failure of so many to integrate, or the many international surveys showing persistent retrograde and intollerant anti democratic values held by often a majority of our new immigrants, can only get louder.

He gives a compelling list of problems which, when put together, looks very much like a slow motion train crash.

His outline includes: less democracy, more autocracy; Switzerland delinking from the Euro as the European Central Bank starts to print one half to a trillion extra Euro, UKIP and Le Front National parties topping recent elections over all other parties in both the UK and France, seriously unsustainable welfare, an imminent election in Greece, and, as icing on the cake, the little problem of the religion of peace:

The year that started with a massacre in Paris, followed by deadly combat between Islamists and police in France and Belgium, is going to deliver a rolling salvo of shocks for the great experiment of European unification.

fallible, twisted or circular resaoning that when dissected is wrong, does not make sense or does not explain the situation rationally.

The denials of reality by President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and most shamefully, of French President Hollande in the very city where the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo 12 took place, along with several Jews for being Jewish in a Jewish supermarket, have been well answered by George Packer of the New York Post,

This article is a refreshing read on the current, fashionable politically correct pretzel logic. Packer concludes:

But the murders in Paris were so specific and so brazen as to make their meaning quite clear. The cartoonists died for an idea. The killers are soldiers in a war against freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to offend—against everything decent in a democratic society. So we must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day.

No, no and shamefully no, says Andrew Bolt

Following the horrific events in Paris there has been a massive amount of commentary on the West and its continual appeasement of Islam.

There is much agreement that the Western media, our politicians and the Left commentariat are in a continual state of dhimmitude, starting with the White House which issued a statement that the attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo were not Islamic followed by the obligatory “Islam is a religion of peace”.

These events clarify just how political correctness and timidity over the years has got us into this mess. Remarkably, a few months ago, Tony Abbott performed an incomprehensible back-down on his promise to scrap our anti-freedom of speech laws just at a time when our freedoms to express honestly held opinions are most under attack. This muzzling encourages precisely the very extremism that the political elites deplore and against which they all vainly protest.

Gerard Henderson is lucid as always on the successful aim of the terrorists:

Just as fear spreads, Henderson also calls out the stupidity of journalists who are more worried about the growth of right wing parties in Europe rather than the Muslim extremists with the Kalashnikovs who actually brutally kill citizens.

… on ABC radio’s The World Today, Australian-born journalist Annette Young, described a possible growth in support for the National Front, and its leader Marine Le Pen, as the “big worry” following the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

UK commentator David Aaronovitch raises a very clear point on the role criticism plays in the context of tolerance for religion:

Brendan O’Neill spells out what freedom of speech entails and how it has been captured by the politically correct:

Tragically, many in the West, including those who call themselves liberal, had forgotten the importance of free speech, and the benefits of blasphemy itself, long before this week’s horrific assault.

Across Europe over the past 30 years offensiveness has been turned into a crime. In every European country, hate-speech laws have been introduced to control and punish the expression of certain beliefs.

…It’s just that where politicians think offensiveness is only an imprisonable offence, theCharlie Hebdo killers think it deserves capital punishment.

Incandescent with rage and frustration is MARK STEYN about useful idiots like President Hollande — and like President Obama and British PM Cameron — who claimed against all the evidence that “those who committed these terrorist acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion”.

Yeah, right. I would use my standard line on these occasions – “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here” – but it’s not quite as funny when the streets are full of cowards, phonies and opportunists waving candles and pencils and chanting “Je suis Charlie.” Because if you really were Charlie, if you really were one of the 17 Frenchmen and women slaughtered in the name of Allah in little more than 48 hours, you’d utterly despise a man who could stand up in public and utter those words …

They tested the foe again this week: They assassinated the senior editorial team of the only publication not willing to sign on to the official “No Islam to see here” line. And they were rewarded for their slaughter with the président de la république standing up in public insisting there’s “No Islam to see here.

And here to finish is an outstanding piece by Andrew Bolt that covers all the various points raised above and more. Unless something turns around, it would appear that things will only get worse:

They have attacked the very few journalists and politicians who dared warn against the Islamist threat.

Anything for peace, even if it means submission.

And for all the protests this past week, submission is what you must expect.

UPDATE

Yet another wonderful piece by Henry Ergas in today’s Australian:

The reality is that there is a problem with Islam. To say that is not to deny Islam’s immense diversity, impugn the millions of Muslims who abhor the horrors being wreaked in their name, or dispute the enduring value of religious faith in a secular age.

But it is undeniable that Islam’s distinctive features make it especially vulnerable to being used to incite religiously motivated ­violence.

Those features include the glorification of battle, with Mohammed mounting 65 expeditions against unbelievers in his decade-long rule in Medina, and personally commanding nearly half of them; the duty to wage jihad and “terrify the enemies of God”, fighting unbelievers until “the religion is God’s entirely”; the aspiration to impose Sharia law and restore the caliphate, an Islamic concept without parallel in the other Abrahamic religions; and the cult of martyrdom, with Mohammed himself being quoted as longing to be killed in jihad only to be resurrected and then killed fighting again.

If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.CP SNOW

Cate Blanchett made her self satisfied, self promoting oration at the ABC/ALP funeral extravaganza only a few weeks ago, where on the television screen I swear her nose grew a few centimetres, explaining the extraordinary benefits she had gained by all the free university education she had received through the Whitlam Government — aka Australian taxpayer — largesse.

On its heels comes another triumphant self-justificatory explanation of the value of an Arts Degree for our national future, nay, the future of humanity, this time delivered at the North Ryde’s Macquarie University Faculty of Arts.

Blanchett said: “I’d like to posit today that it is the arts that have always been the driver for innovation and exploration. I chose these words precisely because they are always credited to science.”
Quite right. What do scientists know about exploration? We all remember arts graduate Neil Armstrong’s thrilling dissertation on lunar inequality and post-modernism during his landmark 1969 moon tutorial.

You get the drift. It reminds of my rediscovery only a few years ago of CP Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” that I had studied along with so many others in the early 60’s at school.

I very quickly realised in this quote that Snow was talking about the self-indugent narcisistic dreamers of the Left, the culture that disregards and distains wealth creation and industry, a culture with a total ignorance of economics and a culture made up of preachy environmentalists that basically have little understanding of science.

Snow understood the difference between the Arts and Science; the moralising and the creating; the seeming and the doing.

“Most of our fellow human beings, for instance, are underfed and die before their time. In the crudest terms, that is the social condition. There is a moral trap which comes through the insight into man’s loneliness: it tempts one to sit back, complacent in one’s unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal . . . As a group, the scientists fall into that trap less than others. . . . If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the Western world . . . It can be said simply, and it is this. If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of Western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites. . . For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor.”